Long Live General Tapioca
by Expecting Rain
Summary: In San Theodoros, Tintin is captured by General Tapioca and sentenced to death by firing squad. What thoughts run through his mind as he waits to be rescued? And how will his friends survive if they don't get there in time?


_A/N:__ There are hardly any Tintin stories here, so I hope someone will actually read this (if someone does, please please please review!). I feel like this story needs an explanation: I recently heard about the Tintin movie that's being made, so I reread most of my Tintin books (which I hadn't read in at least 10 years) and rediscovered my childhood. I also noticed that Tintin ends up before a firing squad an awful lot, and this depressing little oneshot was born._

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**Long Live General Tapioca**

He has been here so often that it is difficult for him to even remember the desperation that once overtook him. By now it is almost routine: he knows that in the next few hours he will find a trapdoor, a note, an ally, a weapon, or even a scrap of newspaper that will be his salvation. Soon a rock will be thrown through his barred window, or a panel will open in the wall, or he will be able to overpower a guard sent to check on him. For now, all he has to do is wait. He settles himself on the plank bed which is neither harder nor less hard than all the others, turns his eyes to the barred window, and begins to wait.

Hours pass and the black sky lightens to grey, and he can see the outline of foreign trees and rocks. His heart begins to beat faster, the first indication of a panic he has not felt in years. He is sentenced to die at noon. And still no one comes.

Is this what desperation feels like? he wonders vaguely as he frantically pushes against the impenetrable door, walls, floor, ceiling, as he yanks and jerks the bars in vain. What has happened to Snowy that he has not brought help? Where are the Captain, the Professor, Thompson and Thomson, where are General Alcazar and his Picaros, that they have not come to help?

The sun peeks over the horizon, tinting the sky red and gold and orange and pink. How beautiful, some small part of him thinks, but he still wishes it would stop.

Surely someone will come for him, help him escape. If not that, surely someone will pull the bureaucratic strings and save him. If not that, surely his captors will realize who they have in their cell – Tintin, boy reporter, internationally beloved hero – and commute his sentence to life in prison, which will buy him more time. Surely this is not the end.

He says this, but he is beginning to doubt it. He scratches more furiously at the cracks in the walls, and when the soldiers come – twelve of them, all armed, too many for him to overpower even if he had a weapon – his hands are sore and bleeding, his fingernails are chipped and left in pieces in the cracks of the walls, on the ground. They handcuff him and lead him out, a gun at his back.

Surely even now he is not doomed. Perhaps the bureaucrats are still pulling the strings, perhaps his friends are on their way, perhaps it is no firing squad they are taking him to, but an official pardon. Surely this is not the end.

Even as they tie him to the post, he cannot really believe it. Snowy, Captain Haddock, Thompson and Thomson, Professor Calculus, General Alcazar – they will save him, as they have done so many times before. He is Tintin, intrepid boy reporter, and he will not die.

"Last words?" asks the commander in his lilting accent.

"Don't do this," he says without thinking, and immediately hates himself for it. If they kill him now, he dies a coward. He should be shouting Long Live General Alcazar, Long Live San Theodoras, but he cannot, he cannot.

"I'm sorry," the commander says, and though the look on his face is one of regret, it is the regret of a police officer issuing a ticket, of a landlord demanding rent. It is not the regret of a killer, of a murderer.

"Your rebellion will be finished if you do this," Tintin says – his words have more dignity but his tone is more pleading. "If you let me go they'll go easier on you. I'll persuade them to – I'm a reporter. A good one. My name is Tintin."

"I know who you are," the commander says sharply. "At this point we will be killed no matter what we do. Our government will fall, our country will be ruined. But if you are killed too Europe will not forget us. The world will know the name of General Tapioca."

He makes one last try, though he knows by now it will do no good. "You're alive because of me. I'm the one who convinced Alcazar not to execute Tapioca. You know he would have done it otherwise. It's because of me that you even had a chance at this revolution."

"Then," says the commander uncaringly, "you signed your own death warrant. Would you like a blindfold?"

Mutely – he cannot speak, cannot trust his voice - he shakes his head. The Thompsons went without, and so will he (the Thompsons were saved at the last moment, and so surely will he). The general moves back, and Tintin keeps looking at him, not at the twenty guns aimed at his head, at his heart, but at the general and his blank impassive face.

"Fire."

Even now, he cannot believe it, he is still waiting for someone, anyone, to stop this, to save him. Surely the guns are out of ammunition, or filled with blanks, or the soldiers paid to deliberately miss. Surely this is not real, surely this is only a dream. He is Tintin and he cannot die.

But the guns go off and there is only an instant for comprehension and despair, that instant between the sound of the gun going off and the bullet hitting its target. And then it is done. The commander calls for a photographer and sends a few telegrams. In a week it is over, the commander and General Tapioca and General Alcazar and the Picaros and even Peggy are dead in the aftermath of the coup, San Theodoros has been annexed by Venezuela, and Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and Thompson and Thomson are safe at Marlinspike. Newspapers around the world mourn the death of Tintin, TVs and radios decry the villainy of General Tapioca and his followers, of the Republic of San Theodoras. It is as the commander said: by killing Tintin, the revolution will live forever.

But Snowy is dead within the month, the Captain loses all semblance of sobriety and drinks only whisky, Thompson and Thomson resign – they have failed too completely this time – and wander the world aimlessly. Professor Calculus makes no more inventions, and Bianca Castafiore dedicates her every concert to Tintin and so further ensures that the world will never forget. Letters of sympathy pour into Marlinspike, from Chang, from the Emir and Abdullah, from Cutts the butcher, even from Rastapopulous.

The letters sit on a table and gather dust. Even Nestor cannot bring himself to read them. Tintin has died and he has saved no one, not San Theodoras, not the Picaros, not General Alcazar, not even Snowy. He is dead and Captain Haddock toasts him continuously and if the Professor should ever discover that new element he was so near to finding before San Theodoras he will name it Tintinium, and Chang is now a boy reporter and has already exposed the corruption of the International Settlement. It seems every boy in the world has styled his hair into Tintin's cowlick, and blue sweaters have never been more expensive. Jolyonn Wagg writes a biography and grows rich enough from it that in six years when Captain Haddock's liver gives out he buys Marlinspike.

And so it goes. Tintin is dead, reduced to a caricature hairstyle and a million blue sweaters, to a biography that is more than half fabricated. Snowy and the Captain and Professor Calculus are gone (the Professor from exposure to Tintinium three months after he finally discovered it) and so too perhaps are the Thompsons – no one has heard from them in two years, and they were last seen in Tibet, wearing hairy white suits made to look like their idea of an Abominable Snowman. Everyone Tintin loved, everything he stood for, is gone.

Or so Chang tells himself in moments of despair as his fingers grow callused from the keys of a typewriter and the hold of a pencil, as he learns to mask his accent, as for the first time he knocks a man unconscious. It takes time, for being Chinese so many doors are closed to him, and those who would have helped him are all dead, but Wagg's book helps and in time Chang is called the new Tintin, intrepid boy reporter, a hero beloved in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, from China to Tibet, from Belgium to what was once San Theodoros.. Chang too learns to forget the feel of panic, to grow bored of constant desperation. He faces his share of firing squads and stares down the barrels of countless guns. He is Chang, boy reporter, and he will not die.


End file.
